Mistuning and Damping of a Radial Turbine Wheel. Part 3: Validation of Intentional Mistuning During Machine Operation

Abstract

Abstract This contribution investigates the implementation and verification of intentional mistuning (IM) to a radial turbine wheel of an exhaust turbocharger. In principle, inaccuracies in manufacture or material inhomogeneities may lead to random blade mistuning and thus localized modes with severely magnified blade vibrations can occur. With regard to axial compressors and turbines, IM has proved to be an efficient measure to mitigate the forced response. For radial turbine wheels, on the other hand, a successful implementation of IM into a wheel hardware has not yet been presented. This work aims at the design, implementation, and verification of successful IM considering both measurements at standstill and test runs on a turbocharger test rig. The fundamental analyses have been carried out in part one [1] of this three-part paper in order to find a suitable IM-pattern featuring only two different blade designs. The AABB sequence was identified to be the most promising one in terms of mitigating the maximum forced response of the fundamental bending mode at the considered operating point. In concrete terms, a 40% attenuation of the maximum forced response was predicted by employing reduced order models. The second part [2] discussed the detailed geometric adaption of the turbine wheel hardware focussing on the implementation and validation of the IM pattern under laboratory conditions (standstill). Part three is about validating the efficacy of IM under operating conditions. In that sense, the successful implementation of IM and thus the machining of the wheel hardware are investigated within the framework of test runs on a turbocharger test rig. Test runs are conducted for both a wheel with and a wheel without IM. Non-intrusive blade-tip-timing (BTT) technology is employed to record forced response data. A well-known approach to evaluate the raw data namely times of arrival (TOA) without the availability of a once-per-revolution (OPR) signal is adapted, implemented, and applied for the evaluation. The results are compared to those received by using a commercial evaluation software for BTT measurement data. Finally, the actual gain achieved by means of IM is discussed in detail.